My first post about the Cross Community Coalition’s Environmental Justice Tour, on Monday, presented a poorly lit picture of the last farmhouse in Globeville. My second post, on Wednesday, offered several photos of the housing stock in Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea.

Today I want to show you some of the heavy industry that surrounds and permeates these neighborhoods. I’m sorry I haven’t provided a map for any of these posts: it took me a long time to figure out the route of most of the tour. I’ve included cross streets in the discussion below, so if you’re motivated, you can go to Google Maps, search for “Globeville, Denver,” and find the places I’m talking about.

I’ll begin with Valu Tires, at 40th and Steele, which turns into Vasquez north of I-70. Michael Maes, the tour guide, said that a number of junkyards have moved into these three neighborhoods but have avoided the ban on junkyards by calling themselves “recycling centers.” Now, there is a Discount Tire Company a few blocks from our house in Broomfield, but there isn’t a big pile of tires right next to it. Discount Tire either stores them inside the building or orders them as needed. The tour continued up Steele to Vasquez, where I snapped this long-distance picture of Xcel’s Cherokee Station (the red-and-white smokestack with the plume on the center-left) and the Suncor refinery to the right.We continued up Vasquez to 56th and down Brighton Boulevard to York, in the process going by this Suncor building, which is across the street (more or less) from Riverside Cemetery.As far as I can tell, we then took York to 58th and headed west to Franklin, where I took a picture of the last farmhouse in Globeville featured in Monday’s post. But from the map in Google, I get the impression that we drove up to 64th because we got so close to the red-and-white smokestack of Xcel’s Cherokee Station (part of the bus window is in this picture), and to the trains hauling coal.We went south, past the Purina Puppy Chow plant at York and I-70 (built in 1930, so I guess they routed I-70 around it when they built it in the 1960s),and then drove east and north to reach the northern part of Swansea, where I took the picture of the house without sewers featured in Wednesday’s post. Then we ended the tour back at the Cross Community Coalition offices,which are just across the railroad tracks from the Eaton Metals building (I’m not sure if that building is being used right now)and only a couple of blocks from the Growhaus at 48th and York.

When I joined the Cross Community Coalition‘s Environmental Justice tour on February 17, one of the things tour guide Michael Maes stressed was the importance of preserving and increasing housing in these neighborhoods. He said if the brownfields were cleaned up and neighborhoods were properly laid out, Denver could add hundreds more houses without clearing land out on the edges of the city.

Some of the houses we saw on the tour date to the 1880s. Along with Highland(s) and Five Points, the neighborhoods of Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea (moving east from the intersection of I-25 and I-70) have some of the oldest housing stock in Denver. The latter three neighborhoods used to be home to 3 smelters; the only one that persisted long into the twentieth century was Asarco. In the 1990s, the Cross Community Coalition pursued a class action suit against Asarco for heavy metal pollution and won monetary damages and an agreement to replace the top 12 inches of soil in any house in Globeville. (I think it was any and all houses, but I may be using too broad a brush here; I know that Elyria and Swansea had some soil cleaned up around houses, but it wasn’t done as extensively in the latter 2 neighborhoods. Those 2 neighborhoods are a Superfund site, VB I-70. VB stands for “Vasquez Boulevard.”)

I asked Michael if there was a scientific basis for replacing only 12 inches of soil, and he said that it was an economic decision. If you clean down to 2 feet, say, you can’t afford to clean up as many yards.

I saw this house early on; it reminded me of houses in Broomfield’s First Filing neighborhood. (Please note all photographs were taken through a bus window. Some are clearer than others.) At the other end of the spectrum are the Globeville Townhomes at 51st and Logan, which were built on remediated land. Most of the townhomes are Section 8 rentals, but 12 units are on sale for up to $193,000. These new townhouses are a few blocks east of I-25, a few blocks north of I-70, and have a rail line running along their eastern edge. Xcel Energy’s Cherokee Station, a coal-fired power plant with the red-and-white smokestack visible from I-25, is located west of York between 58th and 64th.

A woman who works for Habitat for Humanity was on the tour, and she said Habitat had done blower-door tests on a townhouse and found that it wasn’t very energy-efficient. So let’s see: we have townhomes that are built on a brownfield, priced beyond what people in the neighborhood can pay, and not that eco-friendly. It’s not surprising that only 1 unit has sold.

Across the street are the old headquarters for Asarco (the red buildings) and the rail line beyond the 2 fences.

We drove all over north Denver on this tour, and I couldn’t always keep track of where we were going, but this house is located at the corner of St. Paul and 52nd in north Swansea. I’m not sure if it’s a new house or has just been renovated, but it looks pretty nice. Take a look, though, at the bottom left corner: there are no sewers.

Michael Maes stressed that family life was important to people who lived in these neighborhoods and that the neighborhoods are important to the families who live there. Despite the enterprise zone, there’s still lots of housing, and Maes definitely thinks there could be a lot more. Certainly people in Elyria, who are fighting a proposed realignment of I-70 right by Elyria Park (on 48th, between High and Race Streets), would like their housing values to increase (they’ve declined since the plans to realign I-70 were announced).

On February 17 I took an Environmental Justice tour of the Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea neighborhoods sponsored by the Cross Community Coalition. I heard of it through Transition Denver and the Growhaus, located in the old Lehrer Flowers building on York between 47th and 48th.

The tour guide, Michael Maes, said Globeville (located around the intersection of I-25 and I-70; Elyria and Swansea are to the east, with York as their dividing line), used to be the “garden” area of Denver, with lots of small gardens and truck farms. People could drive there and buy produce from the farmers’ trucks. But the last farm in the area sold out five years ago. It’s located on Franklin, but unfortunately I didn’t write down the cross-street (58th, perhaps?). It’s the dark house on the right in the photo. The beige building on Franklin was built in the past five years.Maes said there are 6 Superfund sites within a 2-mile radius of these neighborhoods (and that Swansea and Elyria are one of those Superfund sites). There is an oil refinery in this area, at least 1 coal-burning plant, and a water management plant.

Michael grew up in the area and has lived there all his life. He was there when Denver decided to approve an enterprise zone in the city, which allows business and industry to move in. On the tour, I saw streets where businesses had bought a couple of lots and torn down the houses and put some kind of business in its place. How would you feel if someone bought the 2 houses next to you and turned those lots into industry?

If you want more information about Growhaus, I suggest contacting Wild Green Yonder, a site focused on sustainability and the grow local movement.